The field of the present disclosure relates to systems and methods for fraud prevention, and more particularly, to systems and methods for prevention of fraud due to the substitution of machine-readable identification tags.
The use of machine-readable identification tags on goods has become ubiquitous in many industries. Optically readable tags, such as barcodes, enable the quick and automated identification of goods. For example, in the retail industry the Uniform Product Code (UPC) barcode is widely used. There are many other uses of barcodes, such as identifying industrial goods in factories and warehouses and in luggage handling systems. Non-optical identification tags, such as radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, are becoming increasingly popular.
With the expansion of the use of machine-readable identification tags there has been an increase in the occurrence of fraudulent identification tags, particularly with UPC barcodes in the retail environment. Such fraud will typically involve the perpetrator applying to an item to be purchased the UPC barcode for a less costly item. Several methods to circumvent UPC barcode substitution fraud have been employed. One method is to rely on a checkout clerk to read the description of a scanned item on the point of sale (POS) terminal and to visually inspect the item to see if it matches the description. This method is slow, and is prone to human error. This method is also not effective against unscrupulous checkout clerks.
Another method used to deter UPC barcode substitution fraud is found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,115,888 to Schneider, which discloses a self-service checkout system in which scanned items are weighed. The measured weight of the scanned item is compared to an expected weight corresponding to the scanned UPC barcode. Supervisory personnel are alerted if a discrepancy in the two weights is found. The system may not be able, however, to distinguish a fraudulent UPC barcode in many cases where the item having the fraudulent UPC barcode weighs about the same as the expected item.
A system that verifies both the weight and the shape of an item to be purchased is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,792,018 to Humble. In this patent, a self-service checkout system weighs and obtains a silhouette of an item being scanned. The weight and silhouette characteristics are compared to an expected weight and silhouette previously stored in a database to determine if the UPC barcode is fraudulent. While some degree of security is provided in this system, this system is not useful where the weight and shape of the legitimate and fraudulent product are similar.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,883,968 to Welch et al. discloses a system that compares the color information of a scanned item with the color information of the item associated with the scanned UPC barcode. This is done by acquiring a color image of the item and then generating color histograms from the image. The color histograms are then compared to the color histogram of the expected item. However, this system may not be effective in situations where the two items being compared have the same color information, but differ in more subtle ways, such as the name or model number. Also, this system may not work well where the conditions under which the image of the item stored in the database differ from those of the scanned item. For example, differences in lighting, viewing angle and distance from the camera may result in the same item appearing different enough to be identified as a different item. The result may be an incorrect identification of a legitimate transaction as being fraudulent, which is undesirable.
As can be seen, there is a need for a system and method for detecting the presence of fraudulent identification tags, such as UPC barcodes. There is a also a need for a system that can detect fraudulent identification tags, which does not rely on human input, is fast and can tolerate different image acquisition conditions. There is a further need for a system that can effectively detect fraudulent identification tags with very few instances of legitimate transactions being identified as fraudulent.